If a music appreciation class were to listen to the Sonata Op. 81a, without being aware of the programmatic titles, and another class were to listen to the same sonata but after being told the titles of the three movements, the second group would almost certainly remember the piece in greater detail. The historical background alone is like a fabric of fantasy woven of threads of a variety of colors—the Archduke who later became an Archbishop, Beethoven’s gifted student and patron, the relationship of a Hapsburg royal to a composer who once felt the need to insist that the “van” in his name indicated nobility, the approach of the French armies, the flight of the Archduke—making a pattern we know as the Les Adieux Sonata. Descriptive or programmatic music will be taken seriously or not according to the associations established in the mind. If they are too literal, the piece will seem more entertaining than serious. However, imagining the sentiments that were exchanged between these two flesh-and-blood human beings coming from two widely separated levels of society and meeting in a kind of temple of the spirit, musician and nonmusician alike will hear the music as an “immortal sign” of a human experience. Life does lend significance to the act of making music.

Over the past fifteen years, street life in urban Mali has come to pulsate to the word-rhythms of rap. Even though various musical styles enjoy great popularity among young urbanites, it is rap that has achieved a privileged status among many male adolescents, particularly in the capital Bamako.1 Rap’s triumphant national career has been facilitated by the diversification of the media landscape in the wake of the introduction of multiparty democracy and concomitant civil liberties in 1991. Yet in spite of the diversification of marketing structures and the plurality of views and styles broadcast on private radio stations, Malian national television remains the primary channel through which new trends in rap are popularized because it regularly features talent shows such as the Saturday afternoon program Jouvance. Accordingly, many young men in town make sure that they spend Saturday afternoon in front of the television screen to acquaint themselves with the most recent fads and fashions in the Malian rap scene.

Scotty was born Rocco Scott LaFaro in Irvington, a suburb of Newark, New Jersey. Our heritage is what America is all about—a bit of this, a bit of that. The family stock of our Mom,

Helen Lucille Scott, was Scottish, Irish, and English. Her grandparents immigrated as children with their families late in the nineteenth century. Motherless at an early age, she was raised by a father who was surprisingly supportive, for the times, of his daughters’ activities and independence.

Dad, Rocco Joseph LaFaro, was the first generation of his family born in America. His parents were from the province of

Calabria in the extreme south of the Italian boot. Grandfather

LaFaro was a stonemason by trade, an ice cream maker, and later a bootlegger to supplement the family income.

Both of our parents’ families ended up settling in the small town of Geneva in upstate New York in the middle of a lovely farming area of the Finger Lakes Region. However, their families were never acquainted during the years prior to my parents’

Attempts to expand the chromatic capabilities of the natural trumpet began with various slide mechanisms as early as the fifteenth century. As shown in chapter 5, slide trumpets allowed the instrument to retain its characteristic noble sound in related keys but did not enable virtuosic figuration or chromatic agility at fast tempi. Numerous technological experiments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries strove to accomplish just that.

Two methods dominated this quest for facile chromaticism: cutting holes in tubing regulated by keys to enable nodal venting (similar to the modern Baroque trumpet with vent holes described in chapter 3) and adding tubing to the length of the instrument through appended smaller slides (like crooks) accessed by various valve mechanisms. Both methods functioned by accessing notes outside the harmonic series of a single length of tubing (like the natural trumpet or bugle) by tapping overtones produced by either shortening the main tubing (by holes regulated by keys, like in the woodwinds) or by lengthening it through appended tubing rather than a slide mechanism. The primary challenges for both systems involved tone quality, intonation, and fingering.

David N. Baker’s estimated catalog of over two thousand instrumental, vocal, and choral works includes everything from lead-sheet combo jazz arrangements and compositions to big band charts and extended works, from solo and chamber pieces to full-fledged jazz and classical concertos. There are also film and ballet scores as well as works for full symphony orchestra in both jazz and contemporary classical styles. The only genre he hasn’t yet assayed seems to be opera. Styles range from straight-ahead modern jazz (mostly bebop) to Third Stream and contemporary classical composition that is only distantly related to jazz.

Baker’s reputation was initially established in jazz (as a DownBeat poll-winning recipient of their New Star Award in 1962, culminating in that magazine’s “Lifetime Achievement Award” in 1987; and confirmed as a National Endowment for the Arts American Jazz Master in 2000, and by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., as a Living Jazz Legend in 2007). His work as an educator was honored by his induction into the national DownBeat Hall of Fame in Jazz Education, 1994, and by the fact that he is currently Distinguished Professor of Music and chair of the jazz studies department at Indiana University. Baker’s significance as a composer of serious concert music will be the subject of this chapter.

THE BIRTH OF REED-MAKING pedagogy in France stood in defiance of the instrument-maker/reed-maker model of the prior century. With the exception of Germany, whose reed-making history correlated with an oral pedagogy, there was no need for pedagogy in Western Europe. Few leading performers crafted their own reeds, so there was little incentive for amateurs to learn the craft. It was a combination of musical demands, instrument standardization, and geopolitical pressures that pushed reed making into the hands of the performer. As the bassoon emerged as full member of the wind choir and virtuosos like Pierre Cugnier and Etienne Ozi began denying the instrument’s limitations, reed making became a critical component of bassoon pedagogy.

In general, reed making has changed little in two hundred years. The first description of it, in Etienne Ozi’s 1803 Nouvelle méthode, varies little from descriptions of modern methods of construction. Likewise, the focus of historical pedagogues on an individualized approach to reed making not only serves as a link to modern reed makers but also touches on the premier difficulty in a sustainable reed-making pedagogy: teaching a craft without a standard. Modern pedagogues continue historical discussions of the physiological, botanical, and mechanical interactions involved in reed making. The balancing of individualization with consistency, first through oral and then written instruction, ultimately forges the synergy of modern reed-making pedagogy.

For me a piece is a completely organic process, based on itself; in other words, the starting ideas provide the fuel for the form of the piece. The whole process is one of listening very patiently to what that piece is trying to do, rather than telling the piece what to do.

– JOAN TOWER1

Numerous published interviews, feature stories, scholarly writings, and entries in journals, anthologies, dictionaries, and collections of various kinds – and now Ellen K. Grolman’s 2007 Comprehensive Bio-Bibliography – offer essential background information on Joan Tower.2 She is among the best-known and most well-documented composers in this study. Born to Anna Peabody Robinson and George Warren Tower III in 1938 in Larchmont, New York, an upper-class suburb just north of New York City that borders Long Island Sound, as a young girl Joan Tower enjoyed “ballet lessons, belonged to Campfire Girls, and studied piano.”3 In 1947, at age nine, Tower moved with her family first to La Paz, Bolivia, where she lived until 1952, then to Santiago, Chile, where she spent two years attending an English boarding school, and then finally to Lima, Peru, where she rejoined her family, who had moved there in the interim. The composer would spend ages nine to seventeen in South America, where, Grolman explains, her father “managed all the Bolivian tin mines owned by Hochschild Mines and oversaw their daily operation.”4 Given the singular importance of mining to the Bolivian economy, this was an extremely powerful position, which brought with it significant responsibilities and prestige. The young Joan had enjoyed lessons with an excellent piano teacher while living in Larchmont, and her father made sure that she continued her studies with the best instructors available as they moved around South America. According to the composer, George Tower

Listening to Tenebrae in many parts of the Catholic world around 1760, a crisis of the ritual would not have been audible. New Lessons or Responsories were produced in any number of places, from Naples to Bergamo, among the Jeronymites of Guadalupe (Extremadura), in the central European monasteries, and not least in the cathedrals of Spain and New Spain.1 But few had the immediate resonance of the Portuguese repertory.

LAMENTING IN LISBON

The ruin of cities was starkly evident to Enlightenment Europe in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. The catastrophe thrust the idea of a destroyed city into collective imagination in ways not seen since the Thirty Years’ War. Given the physical conditions, the literal meaning of Lamentations verses was evident in the city: the walls destroyed, hunger and disease spreading, no fixed structures. The efforts of church authorities, besides ministering to the survivors’ social needs, also aimed at restoring ritual life, not least the exact observance of Holy Week in 1756.2 Thus the three L1s produced by Davide Perez for the chapel of the Patriarchal in the following years, more than a decade after his Lessons for Rome, had special meaning. They survive in some four manuscripts in Portugal and also in I-Nc, the latter source evidently written in Lisbon and sent back to Naples.3 Perez’s own Patriarchal migrated among various churches after 1755, as its original home had been destroyed, in an eerie echo of Jeremiah’s “Migravit Juda propter afflictionem.”4

“Letzte Hoffnung” is one of the most complex and perplexing songs in all of Winterreise. Its emotional range is enormous: it includes unsettled and restless features, stemming from harmony, key areas, and meter, for instance, as well as calm serenity.1 Example 7.1 is an overview of this through-composed work: an introduction (mm. 1–4), followed by the main body of the song (which I have divided into four sections, shown by the boxed numbers), and a coda (mm. 43–47). An interruption divides the voice-leading structure into two phases. The first (mm. 8–25) consists of a I–III–V arpeggiation in the bass and prolongation, in the top voice, of throughout, raised when the III arrives. Even though the underlying structure of mm. 8–25 prolongs an E-major chord (which both initiates the background structure in m. 8 and is arpeggiated, in the bass, in mm. 8–22), the musical surface strongly features the key of E minor: the dominant that opens the song (mm. 1–6) suggests a resolution to a minor-mode tonic, and the dominant that closes the first structural phase (mm. 22–25) again refers to the key of E minor.

This discography places in chronological order public, commercially released recordings on which Scott LaFaro performed. For the most part, information has been compiled from

“liner notes” printed on the container (the jacket or sleeve) accompanying long-play (LP) vinyl recordings, as well as from program booklets and inserts that accompany most compact disc (CD) digital recordings. I have included, however, information from other publications to make clearer a recording date, identities of performers, instrumentation, and related issues. Many recording companies, more focused on getting product to market, neglected to include details about recording session dates, performers, instrumentation, program content (compositions, tunes, alternate takes), initial release dates, re-issue dates, compilations, and so on.

The order herein is first by recording date, rather than by release or publication date, grouped by year recorded. Re-issued recordings are listed right after the bibliographic description of the original recording. If a recording was not released soon after the actual recording date, but much later (in some cases decades later) I have placed it in chronological order by actual date of the recording. For example, West Coast Days, recorded in 1958, is listed in year 1958 although it was first released in 1992 in CD

Not every work from the pen of a Beethoven can be as profoundly moving as Op. 111 or as totally integrated as Op. 13. The appeal of the opening movement of each of the sonatas included in this grouping is not so much soul searching as the enjoyment of wit, brilliance, and imagination. The first movements of Op. 10 No. 3, Op. 22, and Op. 31 No. 1 are sleek, unhindered in their forward momentum; those of Op. 10 No. 2, Op. 14 No. 2, and Op. 79 are only of a somewhat less untroubled character. Yet, with the exception of Op. 14 No. 2, each has a second or middle movement of emotional depth, the Largo e mesto of Op. 10 No. 3 being one of the darkest soul-probing pieces of music Beethoven ever contributed to the pianists’s repertoire.

The first movement of Op. 10 No. 2 resembles a patchwork quilt. The opening theme itself joins two contrasting ideas, the first of which, a four-measure segment of melodic bits and pieces, is relatively insignificant as a theme. Its immediate purpose seems to be providing a beginning for the piece. The eight measures that follow introduce an extended arched melodic line that picks up the opening melodic third and adds a dynamic swell, syncopation, and appoggiaturas. Everything prior to the C-major theme beginning in m. 18 sounds exploratory.

took the Martin to a very hip, very expensive guitar store in Nashville to get it appraised and to find out how the retail world would value my lifelong instrument. The owner appeared when it came out of its flight case the size of a small refrigerator. He said right off the mark that because of its worn, practically varnish-less condition, it probably wasn’t worth much. But the last time I performed with that good-for-nothing old bronze, we played for encores. And got ’em.

A grizzled fellow from the excellent repair shop in the back came out especially to see the old campaigner. It was more than an old dog’s nose could stand. He smiled warmly but distantly at my well-used pal as if it were his first wife. Then he cooed as he twirled it in the air and remarked all its excellent tolerances. But he matter-of-factly judged, “Other than, obviously, many years of hard livin’, it does have a few unglued cracks in the back and sides. And the neck has been sanded down.”

exploration of isolation and engagement.”25 Although the analysis offered below does not approach The Tender Land as an explicitly queer text, it will supplement these and other readings by suggesting that Copland’s musical response to Johns’ libretto, whatever its subtext, constitutes a sensitive and compelling depiction of musical incompleteness or longing.

Synopsis

The opera opens with Laurie’s little sister, Beth, and her mother in front of their farmhouse on the day before Laurie’s graduation from high school.

Mr. Splinters, the postman, arrives to deliver Laurie’s graduation dress and is invited to her party that evening. He warns Ma Moss that the neighbors’ daughter encountered two strange men in the fields the night before, and that it might be the same pair that had raped another girl two months before. Laurie comes home from school and lingers outside the house, thinking about her future (“Once I Thought I’d Never Grow”). Ma Moss comes onto the porch and the two quarrel about Laurie’s obligations to her family, particularly her grandfather. Ma promises Laurie more independence after graduation, but strikes her when Laurie scoffs at her promise, then pleads with her to avoid confrontation until after graduation.